The Case Against “Motivational Leadership”: What Your Teams Need From You After Difficult Changes
Article summary
Recovering after High-Impact Changes: After significant changes such as layoffs, reorganizations, and strategic shifts, teams, especially those not involved in decision-making, don’t immediately move into “motivating” your teams. Your employees need your support as a leader in adapting to these changes and to get out of the reactive mode the change put them in.
High-Control vs. High-Empowerment Approaches: We dig into the critical differences between high-control change management, where changes are top-down and secretive, and high-empowerment approaches that involve all levels of the organization.
Your role as a leader is to help your organization shift gears back to a high-empowerment environment: You need to create an environment where teams can find their footing post-change. This involves moving away from even unintentionally controlling behaviors (examples below!), to giving teams the space and autonomy to process and adapt to changes in their own way.
So, you’ve rolled out a big, difficult change in your team or organization. Whether it's a reorganization, budget cuts, layoffs, or a significant process and culture shift like returning to the office, adapting to drastic changes can be hard. How do you motivate your teams again now? When your teams have gone through difficult times, how can you help them adapt to the new state, and quickly?
Handling such change is often especially difficult for employees or managers who were not actively involved in deciding it, and who may feel like they’re just on the reactive, receiving end of changes that they disagree with or don’t understand (yet). “Resistance” and complex responses to change are normal.
Your biggest job as a leader now is to create an environment where your teams can recover and find agency again. This guide is for you if…
Your department/team/employees were just informed of a big change that they will likely perceive as negative or difficult at first.
You run a department/team and know that your employees will soon learn about difficult changes.
You work with a team that’s just gone through significant changes and want to help them move on.
If you’re only planning a big change, I recommend starting with my Playbook for Leading in Difficult Times, it will help you make even hard changes easier to handle for everyone.
This guide will help you guide your team to findind agency after experiencing significant change in cases like:
Case Study 1: Startup Layoffs
A tech startup with 250 employees just laid off over 20% of their employees due to decreases in revenue. The company’s leadership team wants to rally the employees and motivate them again after these big changes — after all, the company has an ambitious roadmap and big targets for the next quarters.
Case Study 2: Re-org and Team Mission Change
As part of a strategic change, an engineering organization goes through a re-org that mostly affects one team. This team’s mission and scope shift drastically, away from a product area that the team members enjoyed working on, to a new space that’s unfamiliar to them. The team’s engineering manager wants to help the team adapt to the new situation.
To find the best course of action in such and similar high-change situations, it helps to look at the change dynamics playing out. Let’s start there:
Dynamics of drastic changes: High-control vs. high-empowerment culture
You’re likely familiar with the differences between high-control and high-empowerment organizations. I want to dive into them briefly here, as I found digging into these dynamics can be really useful in deciding your approach to leading your teams towards feeling a sense of agency again:
High-control change management approaches
Difficult, high-impact changes like layoffs, reorgs, mergers and acquisitions, or drastic strategy shifts are often handled by a small group of leaders in secrecy. They’re often planned for weeks or months, and revealed to the rest of the company at once during a big, often surprising announcement, that employees and teams throughout the company then need to deal with.
These one-off changes are usually about controlling and managing change: Change is viewed as an extraordinary event that’s eventually done and over. The goal is to guide, control change, and minimize distractions and negative impacts.
From employees’ perspectives, these kinds of changes often come out of nowhere and with drastic negative consequences:
Having their jobs change, losing coworkers during layoffs, or dealing with a big shift can be hard to deal with. In addition, these kinds of changes and the surprise they land with often make employees question how much they can trust leadership - the communication, as well as the decisions that company leadership is making. In addition, even if there are long-term benefits of these changes (such as, for example, the company can stay in business at least for longer), they often come with pain that’s instant and not balanced out by positive impacts. In most companies, employees are usually not asked whether they want those changes, or how they’d go about making them.
All your employees can do is react.
High-empowerment culture
This approach to controlling change tightly is in direct contrast to the principles of change leadership, agile approaches, and DevOps culture: These high-empowerment cultures view change as an opportunity for the business. It means involving everyone at all levels of a company in creating change, and making change a desirable and regular part of the business. Change leadership is guided by goals like empowering employees at all levels, openness and transparency, and making change a positive, ongoing process.
Takeaway: After rolling out changes that need to be controlled, your organization will not automatically move out of this mode that put employees into a reactive position. You need to intentionally shift gears towards empowering your teams again and giving them guidance and autonomy back.
You may (accidentally) be stuck in high-control mode
Sometimes, even companies that embrace change leadership and agile ways of working still make drastic and surprising changes that need to be controlled. This becomes a problem because many leaders get stuck in this by accident, yet out of the best intentions.
Most leaders are fully aware that humans process change differently. But especially if it’s taking your organization longer than you hoped to process things is when you may accidentally fall into this mode.
Signals to note that you may have fallen or be on your way to leading in high-control mode:
You have very specific ideas for what you want your employees to do now and how you want them to handle change
You are looking for very specific behaviors from your employees, like
Getting on board
Getting motivated again, fast
Getting over bad news, fast
Not complaining or asking critical questions, or only doing so for a very short time
Wrapping their heads around the new state quickly
You’re (secretly) annoyed when people challenge your decisions or ask the same questions over and over
You don’t want to hear about concerns or “complaints”
Change resistance frustrates you
It’s easy to fall into this mode - after all, you made the decisions you made with positive intentions, even if they lead to short-term difficulties. And yet, you need to get out of this mode as fast as possible - here’s why:
Why you need to return to high-empowerment mode as fast as you can
I want to invite you to think about which ones are true for you and your organization:
Change management is modeled for your ideas of what your organization needs. You need to validate these ideas as quickly as possible.
A big part of managing change is to develop a plan based on an imagined scenario of how it will play out. You may even have considered multiple scenarios, and tried to substantiate some of it with data. In any case, even if you made the best change management plan and are the most understanding leader with high situational awareness, you likely still have an idea of how things should work now. This makes it very easy to forget that your idea is quite certainly not 100% accurate - which also makes it really easy to overlook that what you think your teams and organization need is not an entirely correct and complete picture.
Staying at a too-low flight level will damage your organization in the long-term
While you’ve been designing these changes, your role has been to tightly control the situation and outcomes: Designing the change, handling the change rollout including communication and other project management aspects. You’ve been working at a lower-level context than your role would normally be. If you continue this mode, you run at a high risk of getting your organization stuck in an inertia trap.
You’re way ahead of your employees, they need space to catch up
Change is easiest to handle for those involved in designing it.
Just because you have now rolled out these changes and are ready to move on, doesn’t mean that everyone else is. Your employees will need time and space to wrap their heads around this change that you’ve already been working on for weeks or even months.
You can’t control people’s behaviors. Your job is to meet them where they’re at and give them direction to where the business needs them to go
After big changes, your role as a leader should be to rally your team and motivate them to get on board with the new situation as quickly as possible, right? — This is a quite popular view of leadership, but my experience shows that it’s unsustainably short-sighted, and I strongly disagree with it.
This idea of steering people towards feeling motivated again is deeply rooted in high-control change culture, and typically only yields short-term results: Your employees may stick around for a little while, while secretly harboring resentment and planning their exit. That’s because you can’t assume what people need after such big change:
You cannot control how people respond to change. And you can't force your employees to perform specific behaviors, like quickly getting on board or just looking forward. Every one of your employees has different needs after such big changes, and what they find motivating (or off-putting) will vary greatly: Some people will need to understand the change in depth first, others want to hear about how their teammates are handling the changes, and others will just want to focus on moving on. Purely focusing on “motivating” them will fall short, and likely even sound tone-deaf.
That’s why the most impactful work you can do after rolling out such a big change is *not focus* on getting your employees to get on board with the new situation. Instead, focus on creating a space where they can deal with the situation in a way that's best for them, uniquely. Here’s why:
Your business needs you to shift gears
High-control mode isn’t an effective way of running a business long-term. Change management and the associated high-control mode have their place. But: agility has become critical for businesses, and making it a foundational part of their culture helps foster innovation, drives team performance, increases employee satisfaction, and supports business growth.
Change is easiest to handle for those involved in designing it. Don’t focus on just motivating your employees; create a space where they can process the change in a way that’s best for them. Change towards a positive and productive mode will be most successful when you let go.
So how do you deliberately shift gears back to a high-empowerment way of working? Read the detailed step-by-step guide in the next part of this series.
